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    The Women of ‘Feud: Capote vs. the Swans’ Are Birds of a Feather

    Famous women play the famous women in Ryan Murphy’s new period drama. In a group interview, they discuss the series and the burdens of public life.The first season of Ryan Murphy’s “Feud” aired in 2017. A juicy survey of the bitter rivalry between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, the co-stars of “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?,” the show earned 18 Emmy nominations, winning two. A second season, based on Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s troubled marriage, was developed then scrapped, mostly because Murphy felt that he could never outdo “The Crown.” Another iteration, centered on William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal, also fell apart. Murphy and his producers toyed with a half dozen other ideas, though never for very long.“It’s very easy to do a show where people are just nasty to each other,” Murphy said in a an interview earlier this month. “But feuds are never about hate. They’re about love.”Then Murphy read “Capote’s Women,” by Laurence Leamer, a gossipy, trenchant study of the novelist Truman Capote and the society women he befriended and later betrayed. Murphy had long been fascinated by Capote. He was equally entranced by the women Capote referred to as his Swans, self-created creatures whom he admired for their style, wealth and savoir faire. Their gift, as Capote wrote in his late collection “Portraits and Observations,” was to offer “the imaginary portrait precisely projected.”Tom Hollander plays Capote, whose betrayal of Babe Paley (Watts) was perhaps the most cutting.FX“It was a full-time job,” Moore said of the roles performed by the real-life women she and her co-stars play in “Feud.” “There were no casual sweatpants.”FXLeamer’s tale had luxury, treachery, artistry and spite. It had love, too, “the very fragile, wonderful relationships that exist many times between gay men and straight women,” Murphy said. With a script by Jon Robin Baitz and direction by Gus Van Sant, the story became “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans,” an eight-episode series that premieres on FX on Wednesday. (Episodes will stream on Hulu the day after they air.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    ‘Ally McBeal’ Star Calista Flockhart Returns to TV

    On a chilly January weekend in Los Angeles, I turned into a truffle pig. I foraged relentlessly all over town, looking for truffle fries.By Monday, when it was time to go to my interview, the only thing in my suitcase I could squeeze into was a Spanx dress.“My sister gave me this for Christmas,” I explained sheepishly to the famously lissome Calista Flockhart as I slid into a booth on the terrace of the Georgian Hotel. “I guess you’ve never owned any Spanx.”“I love Spanx!” she said. “In fact, I just ordered — no kidding — a pair of Spanx jeans. They make really cute jeans. They’re very wide.”Seeing my skeptical look, she reminded me: “It’s not only about sucking it all in. It’s about smoothing it all the way. No panty lines.”And then, as we sat in this romantic spot, looking out at the ocean, she said the thing that made me fall in love: “Would you like to nibble on something? How about some French fries?”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    ‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’ Premieres at Cannes

    After paying tribute to an emotional Harrison Ford, the festival unspooled the newest sequel to decidedly mixed results. On Thursday, Harrison Ford stood before a rapturous crowd at the Cannes Film Festival and reminded us that Tom Cruise isn’t the last movie star.Ford, here with the latest “Indiana Jones” sequel, didn’t arrive at his premiere with a retinue of fighter jets, as Cruise did last year for “Top Gun: Maverick.” Instead Ford, now 80, gave the festival and the volubly appreciative audience exactly what it wanted and needed: glamour, yes, but also soul, emotion, that familiar crinkly smile and a lot of great history.That history was on display in a snappy, coherently edited homage that got the evening started. The salute took off with a clip from Agnès Varda’s “The World of Jacques Demy” (1995), itself a feature-length tribute to her husband that’s a reminder of Ford’s French connections. In the late 1960s, Demy had wanted to cast the then-unknown Ford in “Model Shop” but couldn’t convince the studio to hire him. Demy settled for another actor, but he and Varda remained friends with Ford. It’s a blast when the actor, looking at the camera, says with a smile, “I’m told that the studio said to forget me, that I had no future in this business.”After racing through other career touchstones like “Blade Runner” and “Star Wars,” the homage culminated with a title card that proclaimed Ford “one of the greatest stars in the history of cinema.” It’s no wonder that when Ford took to the stage of the Lumière theater, which with some 2,000 seats is imposingly large, he looked so visibly moved. By his side was the festival’s director, Thierry Frémaux, who, speaking in English, gushed about Ford as giddily as a kid who’s still high after seeing Indy onscreen for the first time. Rather anticlimactically, Frémaux also presented Ford an honorary Palme d’Or.“I’m very touched, I’m very moved by this,” Ford said. “They say that when you’re about to die, you see your life flash before your eyes. And I just saw my life flash before my eyes — a great part of my life, but not all of my life. My life has been enabled by my lovely wife,” he continued, looking out into the audience at Calista Flockhart. He then told the attendees that he loved them — people shouted, “We love you!” in return — and after a few more sweetly gruff words, Ford reminded the room that “I have a movie you ought to see.”That movie, “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” — oops, I mean “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” — was, alas, a disappointment and not just because a funny, misty-eyed and charming Harrison Ford proclaiming his love in the flesh to fans is a tough act to follow. One problem is that the movie itself plays like a greatest-hits reel. It’s stuffed with Nazis, chase sequences, explosions, crashes and what seems like almost every adventure-film cliché that the series has deployed and recycled since it began, though unlike the Cannes reel, there’s nothing snappy about this 154-minute slog.It’s too bad. Ford certainly deserves better, and the director James Mangold can do better. (He shares script credit with Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth and David Koepp.) Mangold has toggled between Hollywood and indiewood throughout his career, with credits that include “Cop Land,” an indie crime drama with Sylvester Stallone, and “Logan,” one of the finest Marvel-superhero movies. “Logan” was especially striking simply because Mangold managed to put his own stamp on material that all too often is so deliberately generic and industrial that the results could have come off an assembly line.“The Dial of Destiny” — the title alone didn’t bode well — isn’t terrible. It’s at once overstuffed and anemic, both too much and not nearly enough. It’s also wildly unmodulated for roughly the first half. It opens in 1944 Europe with Indy being manhandled by Nazis amid a lot of choreographed chaos, his head covered in a cloth bag. When the bag comes off, it reveals a distractingly digitally de-aged Ford, looking kind-of-but-not-really like he looked in the first couple of films. A lot happens and happens again, mostly character introductions, explanations and stuff whirring rapidly.The movie improves in the second half, slowing and quieting down enough for the actors to do more than run, grimace and shout. By then, the casting of Fleabag, a.k.a. Phoebe Waller-Bridge, as Indy’s latest partner-in-adventure makes sense, whether she’s quipping or flexing her action-chick muscles. She’s fun to watch, as are Mads Mikkelsen, Toby Jones and Antonio Banderas, who exit and enter with winks and sneers. Of course the real attraction here is Ford, who holds your attention when the movie doesn’t and whose every wisecrack, flirty gaze and slow burn make it clear that he didn’t have to be de-aged because — as everyone in that vibrating room at Cannes knew — he’s immortal. More